From Avant-Garde to the Elysée Palace

No less an expert than Karl Lagerfeld called Carla Bruni a “beautiful creature who can wear anything.” Or nothing, he might have added. Bruni first burst onto the scene, 19 and topless, on the lap of a dirty old man, for a late-80s Guess campaign. By 1991 she could be found in *Vogue*, dominating a group shot of supermodels, each glamazon vamping her heart out in a skintight leopard Alaia catsuit. But Carla alone gazes piercingly out of the picture, “with the look”—to use the words of one love rival—“of a killer.”

“Killer chic” is perhaps an apt way to describe the heiress-mannequin-musician’s knockout style. Her “insanely perfect ass” (Vogue’s phrase) has been draped every possible way by the grandest masters of couture. On Yves Saint Laurent’s runway, she played the part of an exquisitely polished Parisian. For Vivienne Westwood, she transformed into a punk princess, and for Gaultier, she became a diva of the avant-garde. Off duty, she was in jeans and bare feet, accessorized with an acoustic guitar—she was, it seemed, also an authentic haute boho. With her shifting costumes and identities, Carla Bruni was the turn of the century’s ultimate post-modern pinup.

Yet she didn’t leave behind these earlier incarnations when she ascended to the role of First Lady; political wife was just another string to her huntress’s bow. She understood that in personifying France, she must also embody the great national luxury labels of Dior, Chanel, and Hermès. The world became her runway, royal palaces her showrooms. How ironic that the reactionary Iranian press labeled her a “prostitute” when she was one of the few fashionable beauties of the new 21st century who refused to dress like one. In an age of teetering do-me platforms, she wore graceful flats, the better to set off her shorter husband’s stature. In a period of butt-high micro-minis, she revived the ladylike knee-length skirt. During a moment of ballooning breast augmentations and bottle-blonde hair extensions, she remained fetchingly small-chested and brunette. And after giving birth to her daughter, she bucked the trend of post-partum self-loathing and self-mortification, allowing herself briefly to be, as the British tabloids put it, a “hot mess.”

With or without clothes, singing a sultry lyric or curtsying before a queen, Carla Bruni is a love goddess of many guises, and in every one of them, Lagerfeld has observed, she is “always perfect.”